A Day in the Life of Salumi at Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria

As promised, here’s a point-by-point illustrated rundown of how the salumi is made at Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria. For those who missed the last post, the Alimentari & Vineria is a shop and restaurant in lower Manhattan that recently rebooted its salumi program, with help from chef and salumiere Christopher Lee (a Chez Panisse veteran who’s now working on the Pop-Up General Store in Oakland).

And a word of warning: A pig gets butchered in these photos (shot by photographer William Hereford). We still recommend checking them out. The pigs at Il Buco are sourced from three separate farms that owner Donna Lennard has been working with for years–EcoFriendly Food’s Starling Farm and Cane Creek Farm, both in North Carolina, and upstate New York’s Flying Pigs Farm.

The breakdown begins

Christopher Lee demonstrating how to split two legs to make prosciutto. “This is a process with a long history, and tradition behind it. It’s an honor, really, to do this.”

Chef Lee calls Bernardo Flores (pictured here), who has been running Il Buco’s charcuterie program for years, “the real artist” of the team. Chef Flores, in turn, shakes his head and calls Lee “The real teacher.”

Chef Flores gets the rest of the pig (hams removed) in position on the table to break down into smaller cuts. When the pair was working overtime to get the program started last summer, Chefs Lee and Flores went down to a farm in Virginia and butchered eight 300-pound pigs in one six-hour day. In other words, they are good at this.

The salumiere only use the saw to cut through the biggest bones, preferring to slice along the pig’s natural curves for most cuts.

A front leg, before further butchering. This hog is smaller than what they’d normally use for salumi, but they were nice enough to use it to demonstrate for us. The older hogs, especially the ossabaw breed that Chef Lee loves, develop a richer, firmer flesh that’s perfect for curing.

The keys to the processing and curing room. The pig keychain lights up and oinks.

Pig in a box, waiting to be further processed later on. And one last pig note: all the pork in the salumi program is raised naturally, without antibiotics and the like. Organic pigs are really difficult to come by, just because of the sheer volume of organic feed they need.

A mix of shoulder meat and backfat (all pork) makes its way through the grinder. Il Buco may take a shot at making bresaola (a cured beef) in the future, but it’s all pigs for the moment (as is most of Italian salumi).

Chef Flores adds spices to the mix. To make sure that nothing goes wrong in the curing process, they mix in a tiny bit of lactobacillus to kickstart the fermentation/curing, and a little bit of nitrate to avoid botulism contamination early on in the process (the nitrates dissolve out by the time the sausages are cured).

Mixing not only gets the spices in the meat, but improves its consistency, ensuring a good, solid sausage.

A hand-cranked press pushes the filling out into casings made of beef intestine

Donna Lennard, owner of Il Buco, watches through a window as Chef Lee makes a finocchiono, or fennel salume, which is really, very delicious (we got to try some finished product upstairs).

The aging rack: First, the fresh sausages spend a few days (up to a week) in the “bloom room,” the first of two temperature- and humidity-controlled curing chambers, where temperatures in the 70s kick fermentation into high gear.

Then, the salumi are moved to the aging room, where they’ll stay for months (or years, in the case of prosciutto), slowly drying out and intensifying in flavor.